For those of you who didn't know this, Yahoo! has a search engine called Yahoo! Search, allowing searching for almost anything on the Internet as easily as in the case Google Search. Although the search engine of those from Google is much more popular globally, the CEO of Yahoo! shows its interest in stopping the supremacy of the competing company. In this idea, Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo!, stated that she would be interested in negotiating with Apple to set Yahoo! Search as the default search engine for Safari in iOS and OS X.
The Safari platform is basically one of the premier search deals in the world, if not the premier search deal in the world. We're definitely in the search distribution business. I think that we've stated that really clearly in the past and I think with Mozilla and also in addition we brought Amazon eBay on board with smaller distribution partnerships in Q4.
Mayer stated for the BBC that a collaboration with Apple for Yahoo! Search would be one of the largest partnerships in the world regarding the segment of internet search engines. In 2010, Apple entered into a partnership with Google to make google.com the default search engine of iOS and OS X, but that partnership will expire later this year. Google pays 1 billion dollars annually for the position it occupies in operating systems and Apple could decide this year to seriously attack its competitor.
We're in the search distribution business and anyone who is in that business needs to be interested in the Safari deal. The Safari users are among the most engaged and lucrative users in the world and it's something we would really like to be able to provide. We've worked really closely with Mozilla to ultimately bring to their users an experience that they designed and that they feel really suits those users.
Google Maps and YouTube are no longer native iOS applications, Find My iPhone no longer uses Google Maps, and the next "victim" of Apple could be Google Search. In recent years, Apple has distanced itself from Google and a partnership with Yahoo! it would be the "coup de grace" that those from Cupertino could give to the competitor. Removing Google Search as the default search engine from hundreds of millions of iDevices and tens of millions of Macs would seriously affect google.com traffic worldwide and implicitly the company's revenues.
Whether or not Apple will attack Google on this front remains to be seen, but there is a good chance that Google Search will be replaced this year by Yahoo! or Bing.
